Album Review – Lana Del Rey

Review — By Andrew Evans on 28/01/12

“Many have already made their minds up on Lana Del Rey and this isn’t the kind of album to change those opinions…”

Lana Del Rey | Born To Die

It’s been a long time since someone has come around like Lana Del Rey. Someone that divides opinion in the way she does. Someone that people love or loathe. Someone that has confused and confounded in equal measure.

Perhaps it is the confusing back story, involving both an extremely wealthy father and a stint living in a trailer park. Or the scrap-that-and-start-again reinvention from Lizzy Grant to Lana Del Rey. Or, you know, the huge lips. One thing is for sure: those that don’t like Lana Del Rey really don’t like her. But the reasons for doing so are rarely the actual tunes.

So with expectation, hype and backlash having already spread their wings since Video Games went up on Youtube six months ago, will Born To Die, in all it’s 12-track glory, finally put things to bed? The answer in as emphatic no.

What you can’t deny, no matter which camp you stand in, is that Born To Die does posses some seriously good songs. It’s biggest problem however is that, with the release of various singles and the Lana Del Rey EP, you’ve probably already heard them.

If you delve into this record in search of something more beautiful or haunting as Video Games, you will be disappointed. If you want something more knowingly cheeky as Off To The Races, you will come away disappointed. If you want something as slow-burningly delicious as its title track or the sticky Blue Jeans, yup you’ve guessed it. But let’s not forget that these tracks do appear here, no matter how familiar we already are with them. That they make up the opening quartet ensures Born To Die gets off to a magnificent, if not rather well-thumbed start.

That it’s followed by one-two punch of ultra-poppy Diet Mountain Dew – her love letter to New York – and National Anthem – on which she shimmy’s and pouts more than any other track, something you will either love or find difficult to listen to – confirms that the first six tracks are of real quality.

What they also do however is set its writer up for one hell of a fall. You see, much like her audience her debut album is, quite literally, split right down the middle. It’s final six tracks stumble and are unsure of what they are trying to achieve. In essence, they sound chronically underwritten. Lifeless.

None of them are total disasters, no. They all posses a half-decent chorus but that’s what you get when you work with a team of professional songwriters. You get what you pay for. Dark Paradise, which finds Del Rey ‘lying in the ocean singing your song’ and glides along over the top of a stuttering, cheap beat, has all the trimmings of the ‘big love song’ but she sounds detached and hollow. The sound of a love song being sung by someone that’s never truly felt the pains and joys of being swept up in it.

Radio again, possesses a sugary sweet chorus in which she urges you to ‘pick me up and take me like a vitamin’. However, it’s the bridge, in which she delivers a breathy ‘no-one even knows how hard life was, I don’t even think about it now because’, that is rather hard to swallow. Without any further explanation or supporting lyrics, it sounds like a cheap trick to get a decent soundbite.

Summertime Sadness, the records penultimate track, picks things up a little with a neat tempo shift in its swollen chorus. That it’s the latter six’s highpoint yet could easily be a Lady Gaga song perhaps highlights the biggest weakness of Del Rey’s: she hasn’t yet developed her persona or her sound to stick to it over 12 tracks. In artistic terms, she’s incredibly young.

Let’s keep things in perspective though. It’s her debut album. There are enough very good songs here to suggest she is an artist that deserves to be nurtured and given time. Album number two could be very interesting.

There are as many flaws in Born To Die as there are shining moments of beauty. Many have already made their minds up on Lana Del Rey and this isn’t the kind of album to change those opinions. It’s been a long time since someone has come around like Lana Del Rey, and I for one am glad she did.